My Name is Resolute (58 page)

America Roberts lived with us still, a young woman of twenty. Her suitors had to pass muster with Cullah, who enjoyed meeting them at the door, sweating and shirtless and smiling with the claymore in his hand. I would send him to dress for supper and the hapless young man would be forced to partake of our company as well as America’s. The only one she seemed to care for was a young ministerial student from Cambridge named Arthur Taylor. But he succumbed to smallpox the following year. It swept through the colonies, taking half of the families we knew with it. For reasons we knew not, its specter spared the loss of any in this family; though my Brendan was ill it was not severe. All the others had no illness at all.

America sobbed night and day for five days. Then she put up her hair and went back to work. She had learned to weave good woolens, and with dyeing and spinning, was every bit as perfect a hand as my own. I told her that twenty-one was not old and she must not resign herself to a spinster’s life unless she desired it, but she swore she did, and I said no more after that about it.

*   *   *

In 1754 when Dorothy Ann was two, Benjamin five, Gwyneth a comely fifteen, Brendan seventeen, and his father forty-four, two uniformed soldiers came with another order, this time wanting more than bed and board. The town of Lexington had been required to supply a certain number of soldiers to be pressed into war, they said, in service of the king against the Iroquois and all Indians. Cullah told them he needed at least a week to close his shop and set things right with his family. The soldiers agreed to it and said they were marching as far south as Braintree rounding up all able men over the age of sixteen, and would take my men along with them on the return trip in ten days’ time.

When Cullah ordered Jacob to stay with me, he frowned and threw his slipper into the fire on hearing it. Jacob was now blind. He could no more fight as a soldier than he could fly off the roof. I saw my men as prisoners. I hated everything about this, not the least their peril, not the most, their similarity to my capture.

Brendan blustered about the house, more pleased to be a soldier than he could name. That evening he proclaimed at supper that he was never so glad as to throw off the woodsman’s apron and sawdust to don a red tailcoat with white and blue trim. He polished his buttons, took his hat on and off until I told him he would wear it out before the morning. “Mother, all my life I have waited for this. I was born for it. I shall make you proud and I shall rise through the ranks. They will salute General MacLammond of His Majesty’s own First Regiment of Foot.” He snapped a salute as if to that image of himself someday in the future.

“Meanwhile, son,” I said, “take off that coat and let me fit it to you.”

“No, Mother. I shall grow into it, I am sure. Don’t cut it down.”

I looked toward Cullah. He pursed his lips. “Well and aye. Add some padding and stuff him up some. Perhaps he’ll look so frightful they’ll all surrender on the spot.”

“Who are we fighting, Pa?” Brendan asked with an eager grin.

“I know not. The king orders his subjects where he may.” Cullah busied himself putting a keen edge on his fighting axe. I thought of his use of that grim tool so long ago. He was still strong and straight as an oak tree, if a little wider around the middle. An ominous enemy to be sure, but a ball cared neither for strength nor training. A ball pierced with no regard for the strength of the man who fired it or the age of whom it struck.

“At least,” I said, taking Brendan’s coattail, “come here and let me trim this odd piece. Whoever sewed this left a snip here. It would not do for a general to have threads hanging off his coat.”

In the years since we started our farm, Goodman Considine had died. His daughter married a man by the name of Virtue Dodsil whose greatest happiness in life was farming. After supper a knock on our door opened to neighbor Dodsil, who was somewhat younger than Cullah but older than I. He was, we believed, a superior man to his late father-in-law, and honest. “Dodsil, come in, come in,” called Cullah.

We served him ale and asked if he would have chicken stew, but he took the ale alone. Then, he would not speak unless America, the children, and I left the room, and while that was not customary in our house, I bowed to proprieties and took them—minus Brendan, I saw with surprise—to the upper floor.

America and I sat at embroidery. Gwyneth sat with Benjamin and Dorothy Ann and told them the stories that I had told her so long ago. After two hours, we put the little ones to bed and I bade good night to the young ladies and went to my room. When Cullah came to bed I was near asleep. The sound of the door latch was all it took to make me sit up. “What news? Is Virtue conscripted also?”

He sat on the end of the bed and pulled off his boots and shirt. I touched his back. He sighed. “Ah, Resolute. Yes, he is. But this is not what I expected.” He doffed his trousers, raised the blanket, and rolled into the bed. Lying on his back, he took my hand and said, “I cannot fight the French.”

“The French?”

“Over in the Ohio Country, they put in charge some green fellow with no more sense than a goose who got himself pinned between French missionaries and bloodthirsty Indians. They drove him and his lobster-backs across the river back to the colonies and made a shame of the lad and the few soldiers that lived. His name was George Washington. Hell of a bad way for a man’s name to be remembered, is it not? Now Parliament has sent a pack of new generals and fifteen hundred more soldiers across the sea. They want to take Québec, Montréal, all the way north into the far Canadas. They intend to drive all the Frogs from these shores along with driving all the Indians from the land between British provinces on the coast and the French territory far to the west. It is rich with furs and gold, they say, farmable land, plenty of rivers to run trade goods to the ocean as far to the south as the southern oceans. Lands I never heard of before: in the north is Nova Scotee, colder than a Viking could stand; in the south, a port called New Orlean, where Dodsil said all the people are descended from golden Indians as tall as giants. The army will destroy them all, Dodsil says.”

I asked, “A land so vast. Can there not be something done just to portion it out? Can it not be shared? Why should there be war?”

“He says the French are bribing the Indians not to trade with the English. That they are taking up all the port cities and closing trade and soon there will be no more goods sold to English. A cup of molasses has doubled in price.”

“I will do without it,” I said, though I rued the words even as I spake them. Living without treacle would be harder than living without salt. “How long will it take to take the land from the Indians and French?”

“Blast everything, Resolute. I cannot fight the French.”

“The English and the French have always been enemies.”

“As have the English and the Scots. How can I raise arms against men who fought and died beside my people? I cannot forget Culloden.”

I stayed silent for a long time. At last I said, “Could you not refuse to go?”

“And be hung for it.”

I sighed, flopping my hands upon the coverlets. “Our son thinks he will become a hero. I would rather he became a Quaker.”

“I will not wear a red coat. I will take my plaids and my pipes. I will fight with the Scottish regiments against the Indian tribes. I still do not know if I can slay a Frenchman.”

“Are there Scottish regiments?”

“Aye.”

“And will you take Brendan with you, then?”

“I will take him if he will go.”

“Just tell him and he will go. You are his father.”

“No more. A boy that goes to war is no more a boy. He must decide.”

I thought of August, and how he changed in just a few short weeks from a happy boy to a tormented boy, then grew to be a man with a deadly gleam in his eye.

Next morning, when Cullah told Brendan what he’d told me and laid before him the plaids I had woven, Brendan’s face wore his dismay. When Cullah wrapped the plaid around him, though, his expression changed. He said, “Will you keep this coat for me, Mother? If the Scottish regiment doesn’t get much fighting I will come back for it.”

May 21, 1755

In the company of thirty of the king’s men, my husband and my oldest son left this house. I watched them go, the one steadfast and powerful, the other slender and jaunty in his new kilt, a musket over his shoulder as if it were a fishing pole. I knew that the army would have paid our way if I had chosen to go with him. I could have abandoned my children to America’s care and gone as a camp wife, but the thought of that was too pitiful to entertain for more than a moment. I had a two-year-old babe; I had Gwyneth and Benjamin, still too small to apprentice for at least five years. Would my man find another woman to wash for him? To do other things for him? To lie down for him? My heart sank. My prayers were not for his life, then, but for his heart. His life, I believed, was safe in hand. I went out to the road. I feared not that Brendan would forever remember his mother, for what child forgets her? I trembled. I would not stop trembling, I vowed, until they both rested before my fire again.

I held in my hand the snow-white cockade Cullah had taken from his good hat. He gave it me as he left. A spot of white was a signal, a sign of a Jacobite. I set it upon the mantel board over the hearth and leaned it against the clock August had sent to us for Hogmanay this year. I had never had a clock before, though I remembered one similar in my parents’ home. Now and then I stood watching the gears move, the links on the weighted chains rising and falling as it worked its way around the hours. I loved the ticking of it, like a heart. Alive. The white cockade seemed to watch me in return.

Wee Dorothy Ann called me back to her side with a plaintive wail that a child has for a short time. When I looked into her eyes I saw Patience staring back. As I pulled my bodice open, I felt guilty for I was glad that Jacob was now blind and I was free to nurse her before my own fire as if he were not there. Soon enough she must be weaned, I knew. I counted on America’s help at both the loom and for the care and schooling of the children, but nothing filled up the emptiness I felt. Nothing I did kept me from staring down the road. Terrifying dreams plagued me, until I resorted to asking Jacob about signs and portents from the old ways. On his advice I kept onions over the baby’s bed. I kept two knives crossed on the kitchen table while I worked and put horseshoes over every door. I crushed the shells of every egg I cracked, small enough that no witch could write our names upon the fragments. Still my dreams tortured me with images of Cullah and Brendan fallen in battle, their bloody faces looming toward me from behind trees. Sometimes in the dreams, I heard babies crying so that I got up to see what was amiss with Dorothy, only to find her deep in slumber.

I did not visit the graves of my babes in any weather other than bonny and sunny and bright. I did not visit them when even was setting or dawn just broken. I went there just in the bright of a clear midday, when all of nature seemed lit with God’s grace. As summer wore on, we were often surprised with quick rain showers, as if a single cloud came upon a place and began to weep, then, finished with its mourning, moved on. It was on such a day I had gone to the graves, leaving America watching over the sleeping Dorothy, who was at last weaned, and the other children who were at their books.

At the headstones of my dear ones, I said a prayer for each and I paused at Goody’s grave. I knew not what to think of the old woman who carried so much lunacy, and kindness, and guilt within her. I felt a darkness come over me, and paused, wondering if it were the presence of evil. It was simply a cloud hiding the sun, changing the angles of the light in a way I had not before seen in brightest noon. Prickling ran up the sides of my neck to my hair. I finished my prayer with my eyes open.

At the edge of the small clearing, where trees and brush met with a rise in the ground on one side and a granite outcropping on another, forming a
V
, I saw another stone. A headstone. Overgrown with ivy, it seemed to face the hillock, rather than the flat. I went toward it to see if aught were writ on the opposite side. The sky darkened yet more. A mist of rain sprinkled down upon me, speckling my gown.

I bent over the stone. Nothing was there. It was old indeed. A forgotten grave. I straightened. The rain had quit, and I turned to leave when I brushed against a man. A tricorn hat he wore upon his head. His ankle-length cape of black wool brushed against my skirt, my hand, my arm. I saw the cloth flutter. I opened my mouth to beg his pardon before I felt the shock of meeting someone in so isolated a place. But, there was no one there. It had been a specter. I looked toward the footpath I had traversed to get there. The rain had dampened the ground, but I saw no treads upon the speckled soil other than my own. I remembered no face, nothing corporal at all, save the fact that he was walking quite resolvedly toward me and his cloak touching my own.

I hurried down the path. I prayed aloud, at first in English but then French, and then Latin, walking faster yet, for those were the prayers drummed into my head, I knew them by rhythm, by chant, even more than I knew Ma’s or Jacob’s old Gaelic charms.
“Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli—”
I broke into a run, gasping the rest, saying,
“Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos,”
as I got to my house. The wee ones had gathered in the parlor, with Gwenny and America, and I stilled my face against the wooden door before I turned around and greeted them with a smile.

After that time, I could not visit the graves of my children. I remembered Cullah’s saying that oft, when he needed most to pray, all that would come out was a scream. When the memories of that brush against the black cloak came to me, the only prayer that came with it was a terrified scream that played against the ribs surrounding my heart. I decided to say the Rosary and to beseech Michael the Archangel every day for my husband and my son. I would also beseech the old charms against fairies and say the Protestant prayers, as well. Let someone tell me a woman may not think of her son and husband in battle with any prayer she can, and they will have a williwaw on their hands.